An agent of change
Attributes: The Chaos Butterfly brings great change. She transforms the world with subtle actions. Her presence is an omen of changes, both good and ill, and also a trigger for such changes.
The Chaos Butterfly tinkers with forces much greater than he is. He’s the deciding vote in a tie, the straw the breaks the camel’s back, and the butterfly in China whose wing flaps lead to a hurricane on the other side of the world. He applies a tiny amount of force in just the right place to change everything.
The Chaos Butterfly, as a subtle force of randomness and fate, is not a new idea. Wild vagaries fate spawned by tiny innocent changes are common in legends and stories. This particular name, and the current flavor of the Avatar, is quite new, and based on recent innovations in mathematics.
Symbols: Butterflies, of course. Tiny changes in just the right place. Small things guiding large things. Rudders. Train switches. Dice, especially loaded dice. Atomic power. Traffic. Storms and other weather phenomena. Kites, weather vanes and weather measurements. Mathematics and physics, especially counterintuitive models such as string theory, quantum mechanics, and, of course, chaos mathematics. Random, erratic motion.
Masks: Pandora (Greek), Raven (Native American), Eris (Greek)
Suspected Avatars in History: Most Chaos Butterflies influence history in invisible ways and do not go down in history. Mrs. Leary, who knocked over a lantern and burned down Chicago, is the prime example. Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, who seriously influenced national policy, is another likely candidate.
Taboo: The Chaos Butterfly must always be on the move. Staying in the same place for more than a few hours weakens the connection to the Archetype.
Channels
01-50% The Chaos Butterfly is comfortable with wild change. Any time he needs to make a Unnatural or Violence Stress check, he can roll Avatar: the Chaos Butterfly. If he succeeds, he is unaffected, and does not gain a Hardened or Failed notch.
51-70% The Chaos Butterfly is an agent of change, and is never bored for long. By making an Avatar: the Chaos Butterfly check, she can trigger action. At the moment the Butterfly uses this channel, any existing tensions will resolve themselves. A person who is waiting to act will act, a precariously balanced object will fall, a long-awaited phone call will come. Only one such event will happen per use of this ability, and it can be used three times a day.
71-90% The Chaos Butterfly is always in the right place. This is identical to the Pornomancy formula Synchronicity.
91-98% The Chaos Butterfly understands and influences the future. Once per day, he can ruminate for a few minutes on a situation. With a successful Avatar: The Chaos Butterfly skill check, he spontaneously knows the two or three most likely results of the situation. He can then pick one of those results, and learn some small action he can take to make it more likely. For instance, he might learn the phone number of someone he could call, or a good place to leave a working cell phone, or a good place to release a pet snake, or perhaps a password he could give to someone. The actions will always be minimal compared to the results.
Hmm. While I can see this as an Avatar in and of itself, I can’t help getting the feeling that it’s treading on the toes of The Fool. Quite aside from sharing the Butterfly as a symbol, The Fool also acts as a catalyst and agent of change and chaos, also has a knack for being in the right place at the right time (sharing the exact same third channel), and generally causes through blind luck or blind ignorance what the Chaos Butterfly causes through calculated deeds.
On the other hand, this could make a decent Archetype to replace The Fool – although considering how similar the two are, it might be easier from a mechanical point of view to retcon out The Fool and decide that this ascended instead.
Or then again, maybe not.
Interesting idea about this looking liek the fool. I think it’s a very good match for the Heisenberg messenger (on the move, influence things in a subtle way…)
The third and fourth channels might need to be exchanged, being in the right place at the right time is more powerful than having a few solutions to a predicament.
Although I’m agreeing with the assessment of similarities to the Fool and Trickster.
Wouldn’t this archetype be better suited as the Saboteur – the agent who disrupts for a cause? It would be as slinky and feminine and is smarter than the Fool and more reliable than the Trickster.
My hiccup is purely with semantics. Don’t stress too much. It’s a good package.
Cheers,
Chris.
How does the avatar sleep if they can’t stay in the same place for more than a few hours without tabooing, and I don’t think it really fits the archetype, the first channel also strikes me as a bit off, the whole changing things while being unaffected thing is a mark of the Fool, the Trickster and the Storm’s Eye.
To my mind a Chaos Butterfly would probably start the chaos internally, someone who is always getting sucked into fads, the atkins diet this week, homeopathic crystals the next (a MH connections possibly), so that as they get more connected to the archetype their gradually increasing internal chaos would start to affect the rest of the world, ordered things like machinery, beauracracies, filing systems, speechs would all just happen to go wrong around the first channel channel avatars (and they wouldn’t be uneffected by the chaos either).
but then again, that’s just how I’d take the idea to make it less similar to the other avatars it is tied up with, other people’s mileage seems to vary.
I like the idea of it being an alternate ascension for the fool. Plus I feel it has close ties 😉